Telemarketing Lead Generation Blog

How Your Prospect's Personality Can Change Your Lead Generation Messaging & Approach

Posted on May 21, 2008 by Laura Johnson, Program Director

There’s been a lot of talk here lately about the importance of using business issues and challenges to communicate with your prospects on a level that carries meaning and value for them. This is a crucial element to a successful marketing strategy. After all, it’s not about you—it’s about your prospects and how you can meet their needs. Demonstrating how you can meet your prospects’ needs means constructing a value proposition that has meaning for that person in the context of their job while still understanding that different people may see the same problem in vastly different ways.

In order to craft a value proposition, use market intelligence obtained from previous lead generation activities to generalize based on the most common responses. For example, “In speaking with other people in your industry, we’re finding that many companies are challenged with XYZ. Our product addresses this by ABC. How is XYZ affecting you?” How prospects respond to this question tells a lot not only about their purchase plans and upcoming initiatives, but also about how they view their job and their company in the context of a larger world.

A few conflicting personalities come into play here:

The Conformist: People want to know that they’re normal, that the challenges they are facing as an organization are common for their line of business. The conformist wants to do what everyone else is doing. He or she may be effectively swayed by case studies demonstrating how your product helped a similar company overcome a challenge. They will want to know about your position in the marketplace, about how many customers you have, what your install base looks like.

The Individual: Some people don’t care what’s going on with the rest of the marketplace; they want to be individuals. They want to feel like their situation is too unique, there is no simple cure, they cannot be pigeon-holed. The individual may be looking for re-assurance that you’re not offering a “one-size-fits-all” solution. They may be more interested in seeing tech specs and customization options. It’s also important that you be able to leverage a strong track record with a variety of different customers.

The Naysayer: The naysayer recognizes XYZ as a problem, understands that it’s happening to everyone else, but just doesn’t see that anything can honestly be done about it. The typical response to the “Are you concerned about XYZ?” question is “yeah, who isn’t?” often accompanied by a sarcastic laugh. One avenue to take here is to say, “well our customers don’t have that problem because of ABC”—use this tactic only you’re ready to back the statement up with facts, of course. While different in a lot of ways from the conformist, the naysayer may also be swayed by a compelling case study that demonstrates how your product/solution/service helped a specific company deal with a common problem. Since naysayers are skeptics by nature, you may need to couple your case studies with technical documentation as well.

The Happy Camper: Inevitably, in every telemarketing campaign, there are a handful of people who are just really happy with what they’ve got, have no pains or challenges they’re facing, and don’t really care to make any changes. Happy Campers make for great conversations. Often you can learn about the marketplace just by taking the time to listen to what makes people happy. These are the prospects that need to be retained for ongoing nurturing. Taking the time to build the relationship when your prospect is happy shows them that you’re not just in it for yourself. And being willing to take that trip with them will ensure that when a pain or challenge arises, they know where to look for help.

Your telemarketing team needs to be savvy enough to recognize what type of personality they’re talking to and adapt the conversation accordingly on the spot. Including this information in your marketing matrix will help to ensure that your team is adequately equipped to handle a variety of different personalities and to present the most meaningful material for follow-up. Ultimately, the key is to always remember that you’re marketing to people—real people with real jobs. Understanding and addressing their feelings about the job—the challenges and frustrations they face, their long-term objectives and goals—lets you build a foundation for sharing information about your offerings and lay the groundwork for a successful partnership.

Tagged: lead generation, targeted lead generation, lead nurturing, telemarketing sales leads, lead generation telemarketing

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